See you soon. Bye.

Thank you. You, too.

It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. I’d love to continue our conversation. There’s a lot to unpack and collaborate on.

That sounds great. Thank you so much.

I wasn’t so sure in what capacity we’re connecting.

That will be great. If it’s OK, may I just check back with also John Havens and from the leadership team since I’ve been...

Yeah.

I’m just a little bit concerned because I wasn’t really prepared visually [laughs] to be here. I’m not sure...

It makes a lot of sense. It sounds good. Great. Thank you for your time. You mentioned earlier that you are going to make this conversation public. Is that correct?

We have to make sure that if we engage more people moving forward, what kind of guidelines we establish that are OK for everyone. This is a heads-up also, I have given the other members from China who are eager to broaden the community. At the same time, we are ...

We have a couple of meetings. Whoever wants to join, just to think about how do we want to engage broader audiences with the council. We currently have about 100 members. It’s a very diverse and eclectic group just in terms of interests, at least. Culturally, it’s not as diverse ...

That will be wonderful. Simultaneously, what we have discussed in this recent CXI meeting is that we will form two committees. One is invested in strategic thinking, and the other one in questions of membership. These committees, I think they will emerge over the summer.

That’s great. I’d suggest that I’m just setting up an email with all of the people who are currently involved to just get you in the loop. We keep you on the loop with any preparations, conference calls, or whatever. You are more than welcome to join whenever you have ...

Love that, too. I would love to keep staying in touch and see maybe how you can get involved in this type of workshop if you’re interested.

How do we actually communicate Extended Intelligence as a concept across the globe, to, for example, an audience in China and Taiwan?

My idea for this workshop is to look at this report and identify how we actually might have to reframe the narrative around Extended Intelligence so that it works in the local context -- culturally, socially, politically, so on and so forth. That might be an interesting workshop to organize.

I agree. That’s great. The small team that has formed around starting an Asian representation, first of all, they mentioned that they would like to organize some sort of workshop later this year and maybe even translate the report that we have drafted into Mandarin.

Very interesting work. What do you think in terms of some ideas how to move forward with some sort of collaboration? What kind of potential do you see in the Council? What would be helpful for you to get out of it? In which way could you imagine working together?

Very interesting. What have you observed statistically? Are there any groups that are participating more likely than others in terms of age?

What do you and what does your team do to actually encourage people to participate?

Maybe this is what is engrained in what I mean by cultural intervention. How do you actually foster meaningfulness along those lines? This is related to each other, but also a separate part of the work.

But there’s of course also the worst-case scenario where it’s only about destruction without a constructive alternative narrative to emerge. The question is how do you foster not only participation, but meaningful participation?

I’m very much aligned with what you’re saying. At the same time, I’m also wondering how we can emphasize the question of consciousness here. In a best-case scenario, systems get reshaped because there is a growth in consciousness that makes people aware of certain issues that need to be addressed ...

Are you using this in your own professional life as well?

It’s, again, very much like going with the flow and adapting to constant change. I’m wondering if this is also like a cultural thing that people in certain cultural contexts get less triggered by it, in reference to what you were just describing, or if this is just generally like ...

That’s very interesting. Yeah. I think that’s were also our shared interest in anarchist theory comes in. I usually tend to think that people in the West - and I would be curious to hear about your experience in your country since you are kind of openly talking about this ...

That’s interesting.

I’d like to explore more how Eastern philosophy can be used as a framework to explain the idea of Extended Intelligence, especially the Buddhist understanding of non-duality.

Yeah, that’s very interesting. And that too could be a cultural thing. I went to an art school in Japan before coming to Harvard, and I used to be fascinated how people created from a much more intuitive place, whereas I, as a European, was used to beginning with some ...

It has been interesting to bring these questions into the AI discourse, which has recently been a lot of times either on the very technical side or, on the other hand, on very simple and almost reductionist world views concerning human versus machine instead of looking at how actually all ...

The CXI report I mentioned earlier focuses on the more pragmatic aspects of the term, such as participatory design, data agency and metrics of wellbeing, but I personally think at its core Extended Intelligence is a deeply spiritual concept. The idea is the more we increase awareness for our role ...

Actually that’s how Joi Ito and I and others at the Media Lab originally connected. We had a shared interest in awareness, and that translated later into the idea of Extended Intelligence, a sort of non-reductionist understanding of AI.

That sounds fantastic. I would love to make those connections. Otto Scharmer just recently published an essay on medium where he talks about the current climate change protests that are led by school kids around the world. He argues that what’s different to similar movements of the ’60s and ’70s ...

I myself am currently exploring how cultural intervention can be a means for shiftig paradigms within the AI community. This coming fall, I am going to start a residency here at Harvard at the Center for the Study of World Religions to incubate an interfaith AI ethics council. I think ...

I agree that it really isn’t enough to look at technology alone. The actual question is how people are using it. I think that’s more a question of culture, something that for example also Sarah Spiekermann is looking at in her work on values-driven design.

Oh, that’s great. Actually, one of our members is working closely with Otto Scharmer and she just introduced me to his work.

That’s awesome.

I’m curious, how did you actually get connected to the Council?

I think that, again, the idea of this is -- what you are also highlighting with your work on radical transparency -- how can we use technology as an enabler of meaningful communication.

That’s also the challenge, like, how do you actually challenge a paradigm without creating an adversarial relationship with people for whom that paradigm holds a lot of meaning.

That’s a good point. I think what we are really aiming for is to develop a narrative that can be useful for as many stakeholders as possible, rather than joining in the usual ’us vs. them’ scenario.

I’d like to hear about your reflections about the Council, if you have been involved in anything related to it so far and what you thought about it, so we can have an open conversation.

Our challenge moving forward is to translate this report into practice. We decided that as a first step it would be useful to showcase projects of our members. Your work offers an interesting perspective on participatory design and I’d love to figure out how we might be able to collaborate ...

One of the original intentions behind CXI was to develop a new narrative for the ethics and governance of AI through principles of participatory design. Our first project was a report that would define this mission, and we’ve published it earlier this year.

At the meeting, there were a couple of members from East Asia who are interested in building a regional representation of CXI.

I’ve been curious to learn more about your work. I’ve been reading a bit about the things that you were sending me along in your email and I thought right now is a good timing to connect because we just had our members meeting in Cambridge.

That sounds good. Thanks for connecting. Thanks for taking your time to talk. I was excited to hear that you’re joining the Council on Extended Intelligence.

I’m sorry about that. It was just a nice evening out, and I thought of going outside a little while we’re talking.

Is it fine?

I’m actually outdoors, and it might be a little dark to video chat.